UMK students earn six-figure by selling oden paste

KOTA BHARU: They started doing business on the campus and now two Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) students are beaming with pride as they make a six-figure salary from their homemade oden paste.

An Entrepreneurship and Business faculty graduate, Wan Azehan Helmi Wan Abdul Halim, said the venture into the seasoning product business was inspired by a popular Japanese convenience store franchise chain, and was jointly developed with his partner, Imer Jibril Mohd Nasir, early last year.

The 24-year-old said in the beginning, they only sold oden using recipes that had been prepared by themselves and then served it with fish balls, crab meats, sausages and others at a stall on campus.

"The idea to do business arose when the oden joint became a favourite food haunt for many students. However, the absence of students on campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, drove us to commercialise this oden paste online in April last year.

"Alhamdulillah, our online strategy using Facebook and Instagram paid off when we were able to earn about RM500 sales in a month at that time as we were only processing the oden paste manually without a machine at home," he told reporters when met at his King Oden shop in Jalan Salor Lama here.

The duo did various marketing and sales techniques including hiring about 10 agents comprising UMK students, thus indirectly helping the students to get a side income.

"At present, we have 500 agents nationwide, and there is demand for the paste from neighbouring countries such as Indonesia."To meet customers demand, we are also able to produce and market 30,000 to 40,000 packs of oden paste a month. We have three flavours - natural, spicy and Asam laksa (tangy and spicy), which are sold for RM10 per pack and have a shelf life of up to eight months," he said.The hard work of both Wan Azehan Helmi, who is the final year student and Imer Jibril, who graduated last year has paid off when the duo is proud owners of a processing plant in Bachok which started operating in March.

"We hope our success will inspire more entrepreneurs students to venture into business," he said, adding their target sales is to reach RM1 million by the end of this year," he said.

-- BERNAMA